IcedTea and OpenJDK now part of OIN

Posted on 6 March, 2012, 18:17.

The Open Invention Network patent agreement now also covers IcedTea and OpenJDK (see the new System Environment Components list). The covered version of GCC/GNU Classpath/libgcj have been updated to the latest release and various GNU Classpath[X] components have been added. As have the Eclipse SDK and ECJ. This is good news since that means the various companies which are part of OIN (Red Hat, IBM, Oracle, Google, Sony, Philips, Novell etc.) have agreed to patent cross-license and release from claims of patent infringement each other and everybody who joins OIN and agrees to collaborate in the same way around GNU/Linux and the various implementations of the java programming language.

6 Comments

Sadly the one implementation of the java programming language not on the list is harmony/android/dalvik, which is what the Oracle/Google case is really about. But it will preclude a similar one between the companies that are part of OIN over a java language implementation based on the components that are part of OIN (gcc/gcj, gnu classpath/libgcj, hotspot, openjdk, icedtea, eclipse, ecj, etc.)

But isn’t the point of patents that it doesn’t matter what the product is?

It doesn’t matter if you’re building Java, Dalvik, GCC or Lisp. If Patent Troll T can show that you use a “system and method” that they’ve patented then lawsuits can follow. And by the same logic, if Oracle has released the Sun patents into the OIN pool (and i haven’t specifically seen that they have) then anyone in the OIN can use those patents for whatever project they like (assuming it fits any OIN limitations).